Is artificial intelligence beginning of the end? 

City Press – 30 Jan 2023

Is this the beginning of the end for personalized creativity? 

If you spend enough time online, you would have seen the AI-generated pictures of black alternative people at a rave or maybe you’ve even created some fun AI art of your own in the recent past.

AI, also called machine intelligence, is defined as a sector within computer science that primarily focuses on elevating, building and managing computerized technology. 

AI technology is also created with the intention of autonomously making decisions and carrying out actions on behalf of a human.

Surprisingly, AI technology is an umbrella term that involves many other computerized tools such as digitize learning, robotics and computerized vision, as well as language comprehension and generation.

With all the strides that have been made in the digital sphere, we are now seeing the rise of AI technology as it infiltrates more conventional hardware systems, including on our cellular devices and desktops.

AI technology allows for data-driven decisions to be made at a faster and more accurate rate than the human brain can compute.

For some industries, the AI takeover happened faster than was expected. 

In the US, fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s and KFC said goodbye to many of their servers at counters and welcomed automated machines that make the ordering and paying process faster for patrons.

Call Centres also had their day when service calls became automated, costing employees their jobs.

While fast food servers and call centre agents worried about the future of their jobs, many of us felt a false sense of security in our lines of work. 

But now machine intelligence is coming for yet another industry – the arts and culture sector, which is seeing a lot more AI influence infiltrating the sanctity of creativity and creative expression.

If you scroll through TikTok, Instagram or even Twitter for long enough, you’ll find AI-generated songs, paintings, film scripts and even novels, many of which seem just as good those written by a human.

I was recently scrolling through my own TikTok account when I found a video of someone who had exposed their AI to 1 000 hours of British singer Adele’s music and then requested that the AI write and perform its own Adele-inspired song.

I was stunned to hear that the AI not only wrote a deeply emotional song in the style of Adele, but it sounded exactly like the Easy on Me hitmaker.

AI technology has been going through a period of mass expansion and development over the past 10 years, and its advancements are moving at a rapid pace.

In the 2004 film I, Robot – starring US actor Will Smith – AI robots are used to help human beings with day-to-day tasks and for companionship, but later become sentient and one plots their plan for world domination.

A similar phenomenon has allegedly already taken place in the real world.

In June last year, a Google engineer went on record to state that one of their Google chatbot generators had become sentient.

Blake Lemoine said he had spent hours testing the machine known as Lamda – short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications – and was convinced that the chatbot had gained a consciousness and was consumed by its own dreams, needs, rights and fears.

While some brushed this off as Lemoine’s consumption by AI and its possible trickery, many others began to question whether or not this was the beginning of the next step of human/machine evolution.

Considering the fact that this is only the beginning of AI technology, we are yet to see the ways it will affect or improve the lives of human beings. 

However, when it comes to artistic expression, the possibilities are only terrifying.

Since the beginning of time, art and creativity have been practices of a sacred nature; true expressions of emotion and state of mind; words and art that perfectly portray how we feel.

The most significant trait of art and artistic practice is the personal nature by which it is created – completely within the beauty of the complex human experience.

The threat of AI technology in the creative world may mean the end of record deals, as many record companies can afford to create new AI music from some of history’s greatest musicians, including Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and Billie Holiday. 

Many of these companies can even afford to create impressive songs and symphonies from some of our biggest talents. 

Today, we have more one-hit wonders than ever, with creators dropping their songs on apps such as TikTok, never to be heard of again. 

Therefore, we begin to understand the threat that technological advancement and AI have on creativity and the creative industry.

The threat could also mean that painting, sculpture, architecture and other forms of expression could become more impersonal.

Is this the beginning of AI as the next step in creative productivity? Is this the beginning of the end for the common creative?

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